Several
friends (including John
Romkey, the gentle genius
who truly gave me <wendycarlos.com> -- thanks,
John!) and I observed right at the airport, which was
several miles south of the capital of Oranjestad, and so had
a longer duration of totality. Also, we were pressed for
time, and had to get right back. That meant getting the 4 PM
plane, which was cutting things pretty close...! The day
before, when we arrived, I had noticed a great observing
spot for this windy, dusty island: a bus waiting station
with open walls, a hard floor, ceiling for wind and sun
protection, and big extended windbreaker wall in front of
that. It was right at the airport. Worked out well.We had some scares when the
clear morning skies went into big puffy cumulus clouds, as
others on Aruba also experienced, and so an hour before
totality we got worried. But the sky began to clear, just as
the prior three weeks of info on the U of MN site said it
usually does there in Feb: cloudy mid mornings and burned
off by mid afternoons on most days, and all clear most
others, only one day a week really cloudy at most. The very
brief showers the cumulus spawned, while nerve-racking, did
help clear the air further, so it was not as whitish with
dust and sand as had been predicted.We thought this was a
surprisingly dark eclipse, at least it seemed so when we
tried to operate our equipment. Most of the brightness
seemed to be concentrated on the innermost corona, although
the equatorial streamers were certainly visible and
traceable for many diameters. The corona reminded us
strongly of the one from 1973, rather a minimum type in
transition with increasing activity, so the streamers had
some fine length to them, but the poles were just the most
delicate of brushes, and not many prominences were
seen.These polar plumes were about
as they show up on the enclosed jpeg, not nearly as bright
as most photos make them nor the new formula compositing
method in the January Sky & Telescope will make them
appear. The sky indeed looked blue behind the corona,
neither grey nor white, and it continued out into deeper
blue, not into black, as again the new comp method
generates. I timed the video tape to be at least 3 m and 13
seconds of complete totality, perhaps a few more seconds
than that, if you're less cynical... About what you must
have predicted for someplace several miles down from
Oranjestad.The coronal "tone" was a
pearly color, a tad of green-grey and cyan blue subtlety
tinting portions of it (I really looked for such details
this time!) You could pick out the sky color in the places
where the corona was dark or missing, and that tone was
neither blackish, nor reddish, as most rad-grad images show
it, nor grey, as some composites make it, in any way. It was
fascinating to compare what I've seen of images only in the
last few years, including those in the S&T article, with
this, the real thing. Sharpened my awareness of the
subtleties, and as they say: art is in the details.Alas, we had a camera snafu
with our big cameras (don't ask!) and so got only our BU
images, 35 mm and video. We would have caught it if we had
been using the eclipse equipment more recently, or had had
the time to practice beforehand. Thanks to the film score
deadlines I'm working on now, there was no time for any such
niceties, just the overnight "micro-adventure" and back!
Shame, as we did so well running the cameras, they were
rigid stable, the exposures all were as planned. Oh well, at
least we SAW it and saw it well (Jupiter and Mercury were a
neat bonus this show, didn't you think?) and got some decent
medium res images to work from.Later a few friends emailed us
a couple of additional jpegs, and so I made a hasty
composite with what we had. Had to carefully hand retouch
pieces of it, carefully traced from the decent Hi-8 video,
in which I changed shutter up and down, to show all the
corona, if only one tiny annulus of exposure of it at a
time... But I'm getting rather faster at this, after the
experience with your good images two years ago, especially,
and I didn't spend all that much time on this -- perhaps two
long evenings in all.It's an accurate
representation of what we saw -- all genuine data -- and
very "naked-eye" in appearance on a good 24 bit monitor. I
brought my 7x50 binoculars, even though they are heavy, and
my eyes were pretty good that day, so I saw it very well.
Sky was clear and blue, not deep blue, but a real blue
nonetheless. Much like yours, I assume (John Beattie says
Curacao had some dust-haze making a whiter sky than ours
was, but their clouds came and went sooner, so they had less
tension.)I also merged in the
grey-yellow-greenish earthshine glimpse of the lunar
surface, gotten from an eight second exposure, as it shows
up in long exposures when the sky is as clear as we had.
It's a neat new look (perhaps a "first" in an all-in-one
composite?), and shows that this is indeed the moon in front
of the sun (sorry, Virginia, no sun-eating monsters out
there!) If our eyes had a wider dynamic range, this is what
we would see. In binocs especially you can make out a bit of
the lunar mares, as you know, but this is an enhanced view,
of course.

You
may wish to compare the top image with this newer composite
just above. Detail for detail they're very similar, despite
obvious differences. The three negatives it was assembled
from were taken a few miles north of us (at the Williams
College site) by Jonathan Kern, another long time serious
eclipse chaser, and amazing lab and optic technician (he's
now working on LIGO,
the huge
laser interferometer being
developed near New Orleans to measure gravitational
waves.)I've know him off and on for
nearly 30 years, when Jon won an astronomy award at
Stellafane for the impressive home-bulit apparatus he used
for coronal imaging of the 1972 eclipse. He really knows
what he's doing, and has worked recently fabricating and
operating specialized equipment for Jay Pasachoff's frequent
expeditions (see below.) This time he used a much improved
custom made radial gradient filter, and a 1500 mm long
refractor fed by a heliostat onto 120 (6x7) film. It was
interesting to work with his originals, which had the
opposite problem of compositing the usual coronal images, in
that the darkest parts were near the limb, and had to be
lightened.There was a nasty red-orange
cast due to the chrome of the filter that took a lot of
effort to cancel out without harm. But the results are very
much better than I'd originally anticipated, and catch what
the eye sees perhaps actually better than life (this may be
the best single image of this eclipse -- at least thus far
it appears to be.) I rotated true north to the exact top,
while my original turned out slightly CCW of true north,
thus the angular differences between them." We're both very
pleased by the results of this collaborative image, and it's
garnered quite a lot of attention and compliments during the
following year, from professional solar astronomers and
knowledgeable amateurs, both. Thank you all!

--Wendy
Carlos

Note:
A special thanks to Fred
Espenak,
for the original html-ing and posting of the materials in
this page early in 1998, when I was unable to while working
non-stop on a film score. Fred, you're the
best!

1998 Solar Eclipse Composite.

Post-Postscript:

Since
this page was assembled for Fred's eclipse site, and then
reassembled for our site, another image has been processed
for the 1998 total eclipse. See above. This one was done as
a favor for veteran eclipse chaser, scientist and astronomy
professor, Jay Pasachoff, who teaches at Williams College,
in Williamstown, MA. I've known Jay for more years than we
should count (!), having finally met when we found ourselves
both "captives" on the SS Fairsea, out in the central
Pacific, in 1977 (see my report under the '70s eclipse
section.)Jay has logged in more
eclipses than anyone else I know of. We're about the same
age, but he got his start before mine, by viewing the 1959
total eclipse from a plane, which professor and solar guru
Donald Menzel had arranged in case of bad weather (it was
dreadful) to view totality a mile or two above Boston, MA. I
was a student at Brown University then, and even though I
lived slightly outside the totality path by 15-20 miles,
with no car and a big exam pending that October morning,
tried at dawn to glimpse what would be a splendid sight: a
weird "thin crescent" sun easing above the Eastern horizon.
Dreary, chilly rain showers and a slight fog dashed my
hopes. But Jay, you "lucky dog", you got to see this first
taste from that small plane! It hooked him, obviously, as
the 1963 one hooked me three and a half years later. (Be
warned, all you totality-virgins...!)Jay has always taken a very
large, ambitious battery of equipment to his Williams
College eclipse expeditions, and he travels with many
student-assistants, operating a lot of serious experiments
and data-gathering (some later appear in his good texts on
astronomy.) Included is always at least one medium tele lens
35 mm camera, usually a 500 mm one, for general views. The
1998 totality was no exception. He had both a 500 mm tele
taking images on slide film (oops...) and a 600 mm on
negative (good). All off them came out well, although in the
scurry of other experiments, he didn't get any shorter
exposures this time. He'd cordially asked me before to try
working with him, at least compositing some of his shots,
using the many approaches documented on this site more or
less.This time I didn't want to
refuse him, and since I'd not gotten any good images from my
main cameras from technical foul-ups, it was a generous
offer, and I hoped to learn more doing it (he also "bribed
me" with his newest two books, and a Hi-8 video of the
eclipse... thanx, Jay!) It took nearly 10 months to get to
the actual work of it, due to the unusually difficult year
after the eclipse. But starting last December, I got out all
the Photo-CDs I'd had made from his best negatives and
slides we selected earlier, and started in.The inner corona was poorly
represented, and it took some mild "fudging", interpolating
inward from the slower-shutter shots that I did have, to
reach the bright limb. I'd seen the eclipse, and had the
other photos above, so was not afraid of messing up. Just
compared as it went on that it still matched reality
extremely closely. From over a dozen original slides and
negs the above composite was assembled. It was one of the
most difficult composites I've made, with the varying
rotational angles and image sizes, film types, and rather
small image sizes (I try to avoid anything shorter than a
750 mm lens and use very fine grain, slow negative film, to
be safe.)But as you can see, it was
possible to make a very "pretty picture" which was
completely faithful to the originals. Later, Jay got
permission to use the SOHO
satellite Extreme Ultraviolet images of that day to combine
with the corona. I did the work again, carefully filling in
the usual "gaps" of SOHO images (this one is the
Fe XII/Fe
IX, X ratio image at 15:46
UT, 2/26/1998) in the data with reference to the other
images taken near the same time, then scaled and rotated and
composited the sun's surface view into the lunar disk. This
is what you'd see if the moon were instead a special UV
filter and re-channelizer, and allowed you to see the sun's
surface atmosphere, or chromosphere, along with the outer
one, the corona, at the same time. It makes a neat view, and
since I'm rather proud of what came out of the assortment of
varied originals, thought you might be, too.By the way, it's instructive
to compare this image with the one right above, from Jon
Kern's negatives. He used a textbook-style radial-gradient
filter on his negs, Jay did not. So the brightest part of
coronal detail, those nearest the lunar limb, are
beautifully captured on Jon's collaboration, but the wispier
stuff that make up the polar brushes at the top and bottom
are weak or missing. On Jay's collaboration, nearly the
opposite can be said. The wispy, dimmer details are more
like what the eye saw here, while the extremely bright
details and features are not well shown. Somewhere in
between the two an ideal perhaps exists. Interesting,
no?

A final
word, and pardon if it comes across as a semi-lecture:
this image, perhaps more than any other, demonstrates the
fact that no formula systematized series of steps can
replace a human being who is intelligent, trained and
flexible. I would be at a complete loss to try to give
you a "method of composing symphonies and electronic
soundscapes" for the same reason. A few of you have asked
me for the techniques I use in preparing these images.
The truth is that you could watch the process directly,
just like you might watch a composer write a new work of
music, and go away thinking it was a hodgepodge of stuff,
each time different, improvisational, mysteriously
directed, with nary an equation or algorithm in sight.
And you'd be quite right, *sigh*.Eventually
I'll find the letter containing "steps" I patiently
listed for Fred Espenak (who is mentioned warmly above)
in a long e-mail reply to him in January of 1998. There's
nothing cute I'm hiding here, any more than in my music
(kids often ask me for a music-making "equipment secret"
for some album or another, and then gape at me when I
plainly reveal that the the way I made this or that was
just by working quite a while at it, doing it over and
over until I got it right -- are schools misleading
children into seeking some ritualistic "tricks" instead
of learning the facts and skills they will need in life?)
Hey, the secret words in both instances are obvious:
"work, time, talent." And realize that not everyone can
do everything equally well, but it's still worth trying,
just like in the Olympics.Surprised?
Shouldn't be. Fred was kinda annoyed, I think, that so
many of my "methods" were heuristic, specific
goal-oriented, requiring a lot of practice with a Wacom
type pressure tablet, and made about as much sense as
describing how to play the piano in 500 words or less...
;-) My best advice to any of you who wish to try eclipse
imaging is this: Don't depend on any formula or rigid
"method". Mediocre, ordinary results lie on that path.
Learn Photoshop (or the equivalent) to a fare thee well.
Practice with your Wacom stylus, blending and dodging and
burning bits of adjoining or overlapping images, just
like you do in a darkroom. Read a lot about the older
darkroom and newer digital image manipulation methods,
color theory and balance, making and using masks,
retouching, and drawing from life. Be patient. At least
some of you will be able to outdo my attempts here
handily, with repetition and diligence. You'll gather
skills you can use for image work of many kinds, and
you'll have a lot of creative fun in the process!And for
"the rest of you" (whomever I've not conned into doing
this by my sermonette,) as I've heard in the world of
music: who says an audience serves no active function? We
NEED you, too. Honest.